Maria Graham, Countryside Chapel from Diario de residencia en Chile en 1822

During the autumn of 2021, Dr Anne Hultzsch (Women Writing Architecture: Female Experiences of the Built 1700-1900 (WoWA)) led a seminar around reading history from women’s perspectives, questioning not only the subject matter and ways of seeing it, but also the mechanism for writing. Using the form of ficto-criticism, students were encouraged to understand this method in relation to the scholarly-critical.

This collection is composed of the texts included in the seminar reading list that were written by women. Only 7 of the 38 texts were written by men (these are listed below).

This course will take the form of reading seminars in which we examine women’s travel writings of the 18th and 19th centuries for their commentary on the designed environment. While architectural histories often focus on male-dominated processes of design and production, this seminar sets out to discover architecture’s past as seen through the eyes of female travellers.

Students will gain experience in different forms of reading primary sources (close and distant) and in placing these into an appropriate context. We will explore methodological approaches linking literary analysis to lived architectural experience, expanding the canon of our discipline as we include the view of women into our understanding of 18th and 19th-century architecture. Students will be familiarized with feminist approaches, intersectionality, and marginal historiography.

Primary readings are accompanied by secondary texts on feminist and intersectional methods and embedded into practical exercises. Students will prepare short presentations, engage in reading and sketching exercises, and undertake their own ficto-critical writing.